Manual voice syncing?
I don't really understand the problems you have since last december. I also tried to create animations from a control-file therefore I share some thoughts on this topic.

Pointers


First step would be to identifiy the phonems in the audio stream used there is lip-syncing tool Papagayo
In this BA thread someone used the Papagayo output as input for the script posted there, I it basically applies poses from a poselib.
I was able to get it work for the latetest blender release. 


Answer


  My question is if anyone knows how i could animate to a voice without
  automating it with the idea of shape keys for certain voice sounds.



I created a script to read a control file with frame#, object and influence to automatically create an animation: Mapping an algorithm to an animation
It is very basic but easy to extend to use multiple shape-keys.